Secadora – Little Pieces of Paper

Secadora is a three-piece from San Francisco whose music on their debut full-length seems to embrace a kind of minimalistic aesthetic. Listening to this album at low volume will leave you scratching your head over periods of silence, as the music occasionally is so quiet that you’ll check to make sure it’s still going. Not all of the album is so quiet, but there’s still a very sparse, simple feel to these songs. Think a garage rock band teaming up with a band like Low, mixing their sounds together for a kind of thin and simple yet still rocking approach.

The album starts almost bare-bones on “Tizer,” with Adrienne Robillard’s vocals coming in hushed over soft guitar, but eventually the song takes on a little rhythm and a little pace and a sudden, unexpected blaze of guitars and drums by the song’s end. The more poppy “One Minute Automobile” is actually pretty catchy, and for some reason I’m left thinking of Sleater Kinney with the female singer from Rainer Maria, and then Robillard’s vocals get all hushed and conspirational, kind of cute really, on the bass-driven “Static.” The more melodic “Blanket” sounds more similar to the slower Rainer Maria fare, and “Gelato” suddenly pumps things up with a Sonic Youth kind of feel and quick changes in pace. “Bedroom” has a nice mid-tempo pace with good rock-n-roll guitar under pretty vocals, and “Make Believe” closes with a quieter, more melodic and moody atmosphere (with periods of more emphatic rock and some oddly plunked piano).

It’s like the female vocals that make me compare this album most to a thinly produced Rainer Maria. Or perhaps a more indie rock Rainer Maria, but there’s still a garage rock thing going on here, forming the backbone of this band’s music. It grows on you, certainly, but there’s something about the production and bare, almost clinical feeling that troubles me with each listen. Perhaps they need to play with a bit more emotion, or perhaps it’s just the effort, but with a little more of either, Secadora could be a great band.